BBC & Cultural Hegemony posted by Richard Seymour

Well, this is a perfect example of what Joseph Nye calls "soft power":

The BBC World Service announced Tuesday it would close 10 foreign language radio services, mostly to eastern Europe, and open an Arabic-language television news and information service in the Middle East.

BBC Arabic Television Service- is to broadcast 12 hours a day across the Middle East, beginning in 2007, and will be free to anyone with a satellite or cable connection.

The move will make the BBC the only"tri-media international news provider offering Arabic news and current affairs on television, radio and online," the company said in a news release.

Broadcasts in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai will stop by the end of March 2006.

Hosam el-Sokkari, head of the BBC's Arabic Service, said there was no political motivation behind the new Arab channel. It will be"there to inform, educate and entertain, not to take part in the political process," he told reporters.

The new Arabic TV channel was formed at the request of the British Foreign Office, which funds the World Service through a direct grant worth 239 million pounds in 2005-2006.

The BBC has a mythical reputation among some as an impartial, quality provider of news and information about world events. I have never found it to be that, exactly. For instance, a study of reporting of the Iraq war conducted across five countries found that the BBC had the least expression of antiwar views, a mere 2 per cent of its coverage. (And don't we remember the demobilising saga of endless military experts, punditry, guesswork, false stories fed by the army etc?). Then there was its retailing of fake news fed to it by the MoD. And of course, there was the hiring of the disgusting big-eared lout Andrew Marr as political editor, a man who announced when he took the job that his Organs of Opinion had been removed, and then creamed his pants over the Iraq war. And yet, despite all, the BBC has been a very effective signifier of quality and depth which, as the Foreign Office notes, enhances Britain's reputation across the world, even as 'hard power' makes its effects felt in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Palestine, Aceh etc etc.